The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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November 02, 2011

Samuel Beckett's disease

"Full house every night", the author of En Attendant Godot noted in 1953, in a letter to his lover; "it's a disease."

I'm quoting here from the second volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, which is reviewed in this week's TLS by Alan Jenkins, the deputy editor. It tells an extraordinary story, and, for those who'd like to read more about the transformation of Beckett's reputation, his thinking and life ("In the place where I have always found myself, where I will always find myself, turning round and round, falling over, getting up again, it is no longer wholly dark nor wholly silent"), the review will be online, all being well, later today.

But there's more . . . . To quote from David Horspool's introductory note to this week's TLS:

"The physical demands that Samuel Beckett’s plays make of their actors are well-known. In Play, the characters are made to stand inside urns, as pictured on this week’s cover. Beckett was very particular that only standing, not sitting, would do: 'The sitting posture results in urns of unacceptable bulk and is not to be considered'. In Endgame, a couple are confined to 'ashbins', while in Happy Days, Winnie is embedded, eventually up to her neck, in a mound of earth. The symbolic and metaphorical underpinnings of all these confinements have been the stuff of Beckett studies for years. Peter Leggatt, in turning his attention to a script in the playwright’s archive that is a progenitor of Play, has found an unlikely new source of inspiration: chicken-farming. In Commentary, Leggatt explains how the manuscript of 'Before Play' – previously referred to but never before quoted from or discussed by scholars – makes use of images of flight to contrast with its three confined characters, who are kept not in urns, but in white boxes, with their heads poking out."

If we have a look at the largest dictionary of literary terms just about always available at Chapters Robson, under 'impossible, the' or 'literary impossible, the,' we will not find an entry:

[Whatever these works in fact owe to Beckett’s wide literary culture, they seem without precedent in literature, and have, in their contingency, their “impossibility”, the character of an unjustifiable fact.]--Alan Jenkins.

"It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. In the preface to his Poems (1815) Wordsworth took a rather different ...".

[Yet few modernist writers speak with such intensity as Beckett does of what was his to love; or have felt so keenly the impossibility of speech and, at the same time, its beauties and exactions. Beckett’s own gran rifiuto, his “poor” struggle against silence, was compelled by an intuition of what he calls here “the impossible that we are, impossible living creatures, impossibly alive, of whom neither the time of the body, nor the investment by space are any more to be retained than the shades of evening or the beloved face”. As Gunn says, the writings in which he gave voice to this “would change our very conception of the literary”.]--Alan Jenkins.

We might meditate on the sound symbolism of "space," "shades," and "face." And the subtle interlacing (consonant gradation) of /f/, /v/. And on the fact that the most important entry in the dictionary of literary terms, from Beckett's modernist perspective, is impossibly not in it.

Alan Jenkins' account of Beckett's letters is not only deeply revealing about Beckett but also very interesting for the implications it has for the relationship between any writer's letters and their work - that is, the interest the author thinks they will have for the reader (Beckett's stipulation that '...only those 'having a bearing on [his] work' should be published...') and the interest readers themselves will find ('what it meant to be [the works'] author becomes clearer and clearer with the publication of his letters'). In Beckett's case, there is a degree of overlap that is perhaps surprising. His punishingly austere aesthetic might make him seem the last writer to whom we should look for biographical assistance, but these letters clearly reveal a personal darkness deep enough to explain both the 'gran rifiuto' and the artistic 'fiat' it drew from him. The extraordinary passage Jenkins quotes from Beckett's letter to Duthuit about his mother is the kind of footnote that comes close to usurping the text itself.

In Commentary, Leggatt explains how the manuscript of 'Before Play' – previously referred to but never before quoted from or discussed by scholars...

This is a bizarre, even a scandalous claim. I must admit I have not read Leggatt's piece itself, but if it gives this impression, an official correction and apology is due.

The draft has been well known to scholars since Richard Admussen's 1979 study The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts. Rosemary Pountney's 1978 Oxford doctorate treats the drafts in some detail (published as Theatre of Shadows, 1988). S. E. Gontarski's 1986 monograph "The Intent of Undoing" quotes extensively from them. When I commented briefly on BEFORE PLAY in my 2007 book "Samuel Beckett's Abstract Drama", I well knew that this was 'old news'; as might Leggatt if he had taken the trouble to investigate. Another interesting recent treatment is that of Ronan McDonald in the journal Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui (2008). And of course, the drafts are also mentioned briefly in the widely used Grove Press/Faber encyclopedia of Beckett. I would be grateful if the writer of this blog could bring these facts to Mr Leggatt's attention.

You should not only read the article itself before commenting, but also the ongoing exchange in the TLS Letters section between John Pilling, James Knowlson and myself discussing just this question of scholarly citations of 'Before Play', amongst others pertinent to my article. It seems to me especially important to "take the trouble to investigate" when you presume to correct others.